Cragmont Stewardship Day with East Bay School for Boys

I am jealous. Forty sixth graders from the East Bay School for Boys got to take a field-trip hiking and rock climbing. When I was in school, we went to museums and aquariums. Those are super fun trips too, but they are not nearly as awesome as going hiking and then rock climbing.

The mastermind behind this trip is Josh Cherner, a teacher at East Bay School for Boys. Josh also started the climbing club at the school, which brings a group of about twenty kids to Berkeley Ironworks once a week to climb. Overall awesome guy.

Josh reached out to the Bay Area Climbers Coalition to see if we could add a stewardship component to the event and leave Cragmont “better than they found it”…music to our ears!

What did these amazing young climbing stewards accomplish during their visit to Cragmont?

1. They cleared off all the major walking paths and stairs of debris and dirt.
2. They cleared off all the major climber trails and surrounding areas of debris, loose dirt, and rocks.
3. They also collected about 50 pounds of broken glass, cigarette butts, bottle caps, micro-trash, and one discarded mix-tape CD.

Check out the photos and enjoy all the hard work of these amazing young stewards next time you are at Cragmont!

Climb On!
Matt Ulery – President – Bay Area Climbers Coalition

Safety Talk in the morning – the kids were psyched to climb!

These guys were awesome – they did a huge amount of sweeping of paths!

Then they went on a trash and glass clean-up rampage throughout the park.

This team found a ton of glass and trash too – that is an unbroken bottle of Jim Beam….this team also found an unbroken 40oz bottle of Mickey’s.

After lunch, we dived into cleaning up of the climbing area – they stared off by clearing off all the debris, rocks, and trash from the approach trail.

They collected all of the loose rocks and put them in safe spots to ensure they wouldn’t roll down the hill and cause any damage/injury. Then, they cleaned up a ton of glass and trash. They finished up by raking all of the loose debris down towards the fence line – we will be removing this loose debris during the upcoming ROCK Project event in mid-March.

And here is Josh holding up the bag of trash and broken glass that was collected – roughly 50lbs – and majority of it was broken glass.